I LOOK AT THAT GIRL AND THINK, SHE DID IT: SHE PULLED THROUGH'

Brooke Shields was a global pin-up at 14. Now 58, she tells Hadley Freeman how she broke free of the alcoholic mother who turned her into a child star

- HADLEY FREEMAN

There is a moment towards the end of Brooke Shields’ new documentary about her extraordinary life, titled Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, where you can see her defences come crashing down. It doesn’t happen when she’s talking about the time her mother, Teri, agreed for her to pose fully nude at the age of 10 for a Playboy publication, nor when recalling her role as a child prostitute a year later in Louis Malle’s 1978 film, also called Pretty Baby. And it’s not when she talks publicly for the first time about being raped in her early twenties by a man she thought wanted to hire her for a film. Instead it comes when she’s sitting at her dining table and her two daughters, Rowan, now 20, and Grier, 17, are explaining why they will never watch the movie. ‘It’s child pornography!’ Rowan says. ‘Would you have let us [do that] at the age of 11?’

‘No,’ Brooke replies immediately, before she can stop herself, and her shoulders sag.

‘That was… that was hard for me, to not justify my mom to them, but when they asked me, I thought, “Oh God, I have to admit this,”’ Brooke tells me haltingly over sandwiches at a photographer’s studio in New York City. ‘I mean, I could say, “Oh, it was the time back then,” or “Oh, it was art.” But I don’t know why she thought it was all right. I don’t know.’